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FOREWORD 

This exhibition is a thirty-stanza poem about a village of twelve hundred souls with whom Lloyd Ney is so fully identified that years ago he ceased to be a denizen of another world to come spy upon them - as Yeats upon the fisherfolk of Aran, Synge upon the Irish peasantry, as most artists in capitalist states spy upon and lie about the workers. Long ago the exteriors of Ney's neighbors ceased to clamor for his comment; the scenes of the village have become fused with his subconscious and he no longer observes the obvious; the actual has become the dream, of which he reports the essential in the simplest manner, using Nature and medium as the servants of the creative impulse.

As you go about the village you see his work related to the lives of the people. In Joe Reading's news-stand are three Ney murals. In the high school hangs a Ney canvas presented by a class of seniors. In the Matthews boys' beer saloon hangs a watercolor. In Watson Roberts' real estate office hangs a drawing. Over Dick Wedderspoon's garage entrance is a Ney tympanum. And Jake Hull, the village huckster, hawks fruit and vegetables in a pushcart Ney decorated.

To those who call his work fantastic, Ney replies that it is the only realism he knows, the reality of dynamic color notes that throb like the chords of a violin, the reality of color that saves motive from banality by clothing it in a vibrating integument that you cannot strip from it to identify and convert subject into anecdote and thus translate poetry into prose.

Ney is wise enough to mistrust the intellect, which begets theories, but not art.
 
Bruce Lockwood  

TITLES OF PAINTINGS
 
 1. "Pop" Bush's Porch 
 2. Cement Bridge 
 3. Canal
 4. Street Scene 
 5. Barge party 
 6. Gravel Pit 
 7. Father Fleming 
 8. Railroad Station 
 9. Towpath 
10. Happy and Greeny 
11. Swimming 
12. Girl 
13. Boy 
14. Coal Yard
15. Outhouse Fire
16. Mechanic Street
17. Main Street
18. Along the Canal No. 1 
19. Red House 
20. Flowers 
21. Brown's Mill
22. Church 
23. Worthington's Garage 
24. Landscape 
25. Along the Canal No. 2 
26. Horse and Wagon 
27. Whitewashed Fence 
28. Dillon's House 
29. Bridge
30. Playhouse 

Transcription Notes:
Do not indicate left and right side - I have deleted these notations.